Systems are known in the prior art for tracking persons such as employees by using computer-based telephone tracking and reporting apparatus. For this purpose, a computer-based tracking and reporting service may have a number of customers, each of which customers is a company with employees that provide services to a client. For example, the customer may be a nurses association, the employees of which are nurses who provide nursing services to a patient at the patient's home. In the parlance of the computer-based tracking service, the nurses association is the customer, the nurse is the "employee" or "caller", and the person receiving the service from the employee-caller is the "client."
Ordinarily the employee-caller is scheduled to provide services at the client's address at a specified date for a specified amount of time. The nurses association (i.e., the customer) may want to track the nurse's time of arrival, time of departure, etc. at the client's location in order to have a record of the nurse's activity and amount to be paid to the nurse for the nursing services and/or to the nurses association by a medical insurance company.
In one prior art computer-based data collection system, the employee calls a telephone number when the employee arrives at the client's location. When the call is received, the Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS) is detected and the Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is also detected. The DNIS is compared with a customer database and the employee is requested to enter the appropriate data. The entered data, the DNIS, the ANI, and other information such as the time and date of the call is recorded and saved. However, on occasion the employee, caller, may enter the wrong caller identification, and the system will record an incorrect caller identification code and will be unable to determine the correct identification of the caller.
In Katz U.S. Pat. No. 5,255,183, a telephone-based personnel tracking system is disclosed in which, while the telephone call is being received, an employee identification code database is accessed to verify the employee identification code being received. Although this system alleviates a problem with respect to validating the employee identification code during the telephone call, it requires a database lookup in the caller identification code database during the telephone call. Such a database lookup delays the collection of data in that it may normally require a number of seconds to access the database and verify the employee identification code against the database table. Particularly at peak times, a database lookup could be inefficient and a cause of delay. Still further, if there are network resource problems, this database lookup may create serious delay problems.
I have discovered a novel system for validating a caller's identification code without requiring the overhead that is associated with a database lookup during the telephone call. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel system for collecting data from callers, without requiring the reference of a caller identification code database during the telephone call.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a novel system for collecting data from callers which is relatively simple in construction and easy to operate.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide a novel system for collecting data from callers which, via a computer, compares a caller identification code with an algorithm without referencing a caller identification code database during the telephone call.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent as the description proceeds. It is to be understood, however, that although the term "telephone" is used for convenience herein to refer to the medium upon which communication is achieved, the term "telephone" is intended to include cable transmission, satellite transmission, and any other type of transmission upon which communication can be achieved.